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Comment by ansible | Hacker News Reader

Agreed.

This is all crazy what we've been doing to the educational system for the last 30 years, and if we can produce functioning adults from it, it will occur despite the emphasis on test scores, rather than because of it.

We had one of the finest education systems in the world, and we're taking all the wrong lessons from other developed nations on how to "improve" it.

And in the mean time, we're causing severe burnout among all the hard-working and passionate teachers who are on the front lines of trying to deal with all the issues with the educational system today.

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Specific anecdote:

I've been acquiring a new language over the past year or so. I went from beginner to a decent (for my purposes) level of fluency in about a year. The other day we had a friend we hadn't seen in a while over for dinner. She's a school teacher in the very language I had been learning, so, naturally, the bulk of the dinner conversation between us proceeded in that language. And, naturally, she commented on my rapid progress, when most her students can't read a comic book after eight years of study, and wanted to know more about my study technique.

I kept it positive because I didn't want to trash her whole career, but I can say that my only real secret sauce was that I studiously avoided just about every practice in mainstream language education. I didn't do what schools do, and I didn't do what Duolingo and Rosetta Stone do. Because, at the start, I spent a while reading up on the academic research on how people learn new languages. There's a lot of it, it's about as well established as any sub-field of psychology can be, and it is, to a remarkable degree, summarily ignored. The mainstream has no choice but to ignore it, because most of what's been discovered does not lend itself well to the establishment of standardized curricula or easy, objective assessment criteria. That means schools don't want to take that advice because it's incompatible with their mandate to assign letter grades, and Duolingo doesn't want to take that advice because it's impossible to gamify.

do you have any articles that summarized the research or that you thought supported your learning style the best. I'm curious and I would like to know more about what you did versus mainstream grading/gamification please.

I don't know of any good summaries offhand, but you can probably find something good if you google "comprehensible input".

Well don't leave us hanging-- what's the secret sauce? ;-)

I learned English in about a year after having failed to make any progress in ten odd years of learning the language formally through school. The secret sauce is (1) completely ignore grammar, (2) never have your mistakes corrected and (3) just look up every word you don't know.

Of course, the most important thing is to have a motivation for reading English text in the first place and wanting to understand it. If you don't have that motivation you won't have any lasting success.

Though, I know of methods that allow you to learn any language in six weeks, but it involves talking to a native speaker.

I was under the impression that the best way to learn is complete immersion. My mind immediately goes to Bart Simpson learning French to thwart his captors (season 1 spoilers, sorry!).

My best guess about why that idea has so much staying power is that it's useful for consoling oneself after having been failed by mainstream language education.

The people I know of who've successfully learned a second language that way are invariably characters on TV shows. Having spent much of the past few years of my life helping two small children learn their first language, I have my doubts about whether the "immersion is magic" approach is really even the most efficient way to pick up language number one.

No, that is a movie lie. You can learn stuff during total immersion, but you can also learn nothing while being totally immersed. It doesn't affect your learning.

I couldn't agree with this thread more. "Teaching as a Subversive Activity" by Neil Postman is a wonderful read that addresses how our obsession with grades, courses and syllabi is completely contrary to helping people learn.

So this may be a dumb question, but by which metrics did the united states have one of the finest education systems in the world?

The one by which all the best students in the world tend to want to get into our universities.

Our Ivy leagues are still generally the most resourceful, best equipped, and best staffed in the world.

It's changing though.

Originally, simply having one at all qualified it.

I believe the idea of common schools originated in the USA, or at least it did as far as Western countries are concerned. Well into the 19th century, the European attitude was that parents were responsible for providing for their own children's education, and nobody else's. Working-class children were largely shut out.

More contemporarily, the US is still in the top 10 by at least some rankings. But talking about those rankings doesn't sell ads or get the voters riled up or help rich parents feel good about all the money they're spending on private schools, so there's a tendency to cherry pick the rankings where the US is merely in the top 10%. Ideally followed by intensely fetishizing Finland.

(Fetishizing Australia, which tends to rank even higher than the nordic countries, never seems to happen. Funny, that.)

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